Washington, D.C., March 23, 2011 – Thirty one years ago tomorrow, El Salvador’s Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero was shot and killed by right-wing assassins seeking to silence his message of solidarity with the country’s poor and oppressed. The assassination shocked Salvadorans already reeling in early 1980 from attacks by security forces and government-backed death squads on a growing opposition movement. Romero’s murder further polarized the country and set the stage for the civil war that would rage for the next twelve years. In commemoration of the anniversary, the National Security Archive is posting a selection from our digital archive of 12 declassified U.S. documents that describe the months before his death, his assassination and funeral, as well as later revelations about those involved in his murder. Continue Reading…

Development of higher levels of thinking skills and abilities among learners; this is realized out of the interaction that takes place among the learners given the different knowledge levels. All are challenged to think better for individual and mutual benefits.

Promotion of student-faculty interactions, the learners benefit from the faculties available in the collaboration network. This facilitates the knowledge bank.

Increases student retention of knowledge and skills as a result of the mode of work that facilitates retention of knowledge acquired because the learners are key participants in the learning process. Continue Reading…

… Markets are good for things like cars. The buyer looks for what he wants. When he finds something close, the seller makes an offer and the buyer decides whether the price is acceptable. Eventually they agree on a price, or they don’t, in which case there’s no sale.

But healthcare is completely different. The sellers are in control. They’re steering purchase decisions. With or without “health care reform,” it makes no difference. Prices will keep going up; unnecessary services will keep proliferating. Individuals, companies, and governments will continue to be bankrupted. Millions will be denied care for lack of funding. And free market advocates will keep saying the market is the answer to our healthcare crisis. Continue Reading…

New global geographies of power are re-shaping our world. India, Brazil and South Africa, three democratic, multi-ethnic emerging countries, created IBSA to deepen their ties and bring their voice together on the international stage. IPS news agency has established an independent news portal ibsanews.com to curate the best reporting from and about IBSA and its members. The site, available in English and in Portuguese, offers a unique window on howIPS news agency and the media of India, Brazil and South Africa are reporting issues like trade, diplomacy, environment and energy through an IBSA and South-South lens. Continue Reading…

… organized from 17 to 20 March 2011 in Tunis, an international seminar on democratic transition, including workshops on the role and needs of Tunisian civil society during this period. It is the first tome since the fall of Ben Ali that such an event hosts hundreds of participants. Foreign guests (from Spain, Belarus, Russia, Egypt, Morocco, Peru, etc..), international experts, officials from Tunisian government and European institutions, member organizations of Tunisian civil society, have spent two days debating the conditions for a successful democratic transition.

The objectives of these two events were threefold: to learn from the experiences gained abroad during democratic transitions, define the framework for this transition in Tunisia and, finally, to evaluate and clarify the role and needs of civil society in Tunisia. The outcome of this work shows full agreement on a number of principles that unite all humanity.

The Leaders of Change summit 13-14 March in Istanbul was hosted by the Turkish Futures Researches Foundation TUGAV founded in 1987. The theme was “Changing to meet, meeting to change”, emphasising the radical changes in policymakers’ thinking now taking place and the importance of sharing new ideas to address the urgent problems facing particularly the Middle East.

The summit was the first of what TUGAV President Ahmet Eyup Ozguc plans to be an annual forum supported by the Turkish government and Istanbul University. Just as the G8 is losing out to a more representative G20 in global economic decision-making, the Turkish organisers intend that such summits can shift attention away from gatherings such as the elitist World Economic Forum (WEF) and provide a more democratic platform for voices of change. Continue Reading…

Published on Pambazuka News, by Elleni Centime Zeleke, March 17, 2011.

The North African revolts have seen Arab countries portrayed as somehow separate from the rest of Africa. Elleni Centime Zeleke critiques the trend and exposes in whose interests it works … //

… Moreover, to call one’s self Black or African or Arab is to use identity markers that are not indigenous to Africans or even the vast majority of people we now call Arab. The question then is: who uses these identities and when? No doubt, mobilising these identities can be useful for making certain kinds of political claims that advance the needs of African and Arab peoples. But still, we need to always ask for whom is this mobilisation happening. Continue Reading…

‘In a country where the opposition isn’t strong and structured enough to provide a counterweight to a repressive regime which flouts the principles of democracy and good governance, the media provides a rare space for some amount of freedom of expression. But now, the media have also become part of the Togolese regime’s blacklist,’ writes Bernard Bokodjin … //

… THE COMPLAINTS AGAINST THE PRESS:

For some time now, the media have begun airing interactive programmes in a bid to help people understand political developments and current affairs. These programmes, often in local languages, allow people to express their opinions on issues or question guests on the show. The programmes have solid audiences, an important factor to remember in the context of the huge illiteracy rate (80 per cent) in Togo. However, the regime fears that these kinds of programmes could spark unrest and hence uses everything in its power to prevent the media from carrying on. Continue Reading…

In 1990, South Africa had an infection rate of less than one percent. By 1999, an average infection rate had peaked to 22.4 per cent. By the same year, a projected twenty-five per cent of all pregnant women in the country were already HIV-positive. In 2005, these figures had risen to nearly thirty per cent, and the death rate among women between the ages of 25 and 34 had more than quadrupled. In 2005, a government national household survey estimated that 10,8% of all South Africans – about five million people – were living with HIV. By 2006 the figure had risen to 5.5 million.

International health agencies estimated that, in 2005 alone, 320 000 South Africans, mainly blacks, died of HIV-related illness; about eight hundred a day. All age and sex groups were affected – including infants, pensioned-off grandfathers and grannies. This catastrophic figure is estimated to reach one million deaths per year by 2008. Recent UNAIDS surveys indicate that HIV in sub-Saharan Africa is estimated to constitute about 64% of the global total of 39.5 million people living with HIV. Continue Reading…

Introduction: Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) remains a health hazard as well as cultural problem in the communities where it is practised. The practice is common in some parts of Cameroon, a bilingual country with French and English as main official languages, situated in the Central African Region. According to the Centre for Reproductive Rights (CRR), FGM is not illegal in Cameroon. This is also confirmed in Country Reports 2003 Section 5 and Fraternet October 2, 2001. In practice, according to the Web site Fraternet, there are still “too many cases of genital mutilation” in Cameroon. In addition, it is reported in the same source that “20% of Cameroon women are victims of sexual mutilation.” Also CRR 2003, 66; United Nations Nov. 2003, 133) reveal that the practice of FGM in Cameroon is particularly prevalent in the Extreme North, the South-West and the North-West Regions of the country where the practice is said to affect 100% of Muslim girls and 63.6% of Christian girls.” Continue Reading…

In this week’s round-up of social media activity around Africa, Sokari Ekine highlights reasons to oppose military intervention in Libya, the politics of a ‘no-fly zone’ and reports of torture of Egyptian activists at the hands of a military previously heralded as a champion of the people’s cause. She also focuses on the Cameroonian government’s Twitter crackdown, planned protests against Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade and Côte d’Ivoire’s ongoing post-election crisis … //

… (LYBIA): … Despite statements to the contrary, are we really to believe that the Arab League and southern European countries are not secretly hoping Gaddafi will prevail? Their dilemma is now how to stop fleeing refugees from North Africa landing on their shores. Only yesterday Malta and Italy turned away a ship carrying 1,800 refugees from Libya. Continue Reading…

Two weeks before Nigeria’s election, Ike Okonta takes aim at progressive politics in Nigeria – or the lack thereof. He traces the crisis back to the rule of General Ibrahim Babangida in the 1980s, when universities were devastated by economic policy … //

… The new regime of corrupt and self-serving editors unable to meaningfully analyse the policy platforms of the various political parties has its root in the ‘great transformation’ that the industry underwent in the wake of the Babangida cyclone in the late 1980s.

Elsewhere, the indigenous publishing houses and the local branches of international publishing, unable to walk the tightrope of importing raw material with scarce foreign exchange and selling their books locally at prices they knew the now vanishing middle class couldn’t afford, shut shop one after the other. Continue Reading…

Published on Qantara.de, Interview with Arnold Hottinger, translated from the German by Michael Lawton, March 16, 2011.

The uprisings in the Arab world have to a certain extent turned existing political systems upside down in the authoritarian states of the region. The Middle East expert Arnold Hottinger talks to Mona Sarkis about the consequences of the protests, and what is likely to happen in the future.

Dr. Hottinger, Egypt and Tunisia are the Arab countries which, as you put it, have the “first act” behind them, and have toppled their dictators. They now face the second act. What might that look like in Egypt? Continue Reading…

The principle of compassion lies at the heart of all religious, ethical and spiritual traditions, calling us always to treat all others as we wish to be treated ourselves. Compassion impels us to work tirelessly to alleviate the suffering of our fellow creatures, to dethrone ourselves from the centre of our world and put another there, and to honour the inviolable sanctity of every single human being, treating everybody, without exception, with absolute justice, equity and respect. Continue Reading…

After more than a decade meeting with government officials and families in rural areas of the developing world, I have yet to encounter anyone who would discount the importance of land, or who would challenge the fact that landlessness is a severely disempowering condition for the rural poor.

It’s easy enough to grasp the concept that land is important, and that it’s especially important to rural families in the developing world. After all, most poor rural families that lack land of their own earn their living by working as day laborers on other people’s land, and land is a primary source of power for their employers. Landlessness and land insecurity, the lot of hundreds of millions of rural people worldwide, is a defining personal and social characteristic, greatly limiting their current options and future prospects. Continue Reading…

… Rural women in particular are at the strategic center of reducing hunger, malnutrition, and poverty because they produce 60%–80% of food in the developing world.1 The FAO estimates that globally, almost one billion people are undernourished and that more than three million children die each year from under-nutrition before their fifth birthdays. Women play a central role in household food security, dietary diversity, and children’s health.

When considering household well-being, it is important to consider who within the household manages the family’s resources, including land, as women are much more likely than men to spend income from these resources on their children’s nutritional and educational needs (Quisumbing 1996). Continue Reading…

What if you were in a dysfunctional and abusive relationship? How many times would it be effective for you to ask or demand of your partner that s/he stop the abuse? How many times do you put up with situations where you have no choice but to defend yourself as best you can from vicious attacks against you and/or your children? How productive is it to argue or attempt rational discussion with your abuser in the hope s/he’ll see there error of her/his ways? How many times should you appeal to family, friends or authorities to exert influence over your abuser’s actions?

How much of your energy should be spent on trying to get your abuser to change, find supports or grapple with the demons that haunt her/him. At what point do you decide that you have to take care of yourself, draw on available supports and build the life you need and deserve? Continue Reading…

To clarify, there can be some confusion in the way the Sanskrit word Sangha is commonly used. In fact, there are three distinct definitions:

1. A currently popular definition is to include all Buddhist practitioners.

2. The most generally applied term includes only the community of ordained monks and nuns.

3. A more strict definition from the scriptures applies to the practitioners who have at least directly realised emptiness.

During his life, the Buddha gave advice to many people on ways to avoid distraction from following the spiritual path. The Buddha never actually taught “a set” of vows for monks or nuns, but these have been extracted afterwards by Buddhist Masters from the teachings of the Buddha.

It is important to realise that monasteries and nunneries have proven to be absolutely essential in preserving the Buddhist teachings and practice. One could say that monasteries are the “power plants” of the Buddhist tradition. Continue Reading…

Diplomats said to be holding talks with EU officials in Brussels while deputy defence minister arrives in Cairo – Published on Al Jazeera, March 9, 2011.

Libyan envoys are in talks with European Union officials in Brussels, the Belgian capital, while the Libyan deputy defence minister has arrived in the Egyptian capital, Cairo, reports say.

The delegation in Brussels is also expected to meet NATO officials in the coming days.

The European Union’s 27 foreign ministers will be meeting in Brussels on Thursday in advance of a crisis summit on Libya.

Separately, defence ministers from the 28-member NATO alliance will also gather in Brussels to weigh options on Libya following calls for a no-fly zone to be enforced over the north African country. Continue Reading…

Last spring I spent some time in the US looking at birds in Washington DC and New York City. That’s not such an improbable idea as it may seem, for both metropolises harbour parks with wonderful wild bird populations, especially in May, when I was there: Washington has Rock Creek Park, a 2,000-acre stretch of natural forest to the north of the city centre, while New York’s Central Park is an 800-acre green glade in the forest of skyscrapers.

Both are teeming with birdlife, above all when the spring migrants arrive, the birds which winter in the Caribbean and Central America and fly up to breed in the northern US and Canada, and of these the most stunning are the warblers, the brilliantly-coloured small songbirds which have been described as “the butterflies of the bird world”. I saw several of them both in Rock Creek and Central Park, and wrote about it here; but what I did not mention were the birds I saw first in both cities, which were sparrows. Continue Reading…

The unemployment rate refuses to come down – Published on The Economist, Feb 24th 2011.

THE ruling African National Congress (ANC) came to power in 1994 on a promise of “Jobs, jobs, jobs!” But ever since then the number of jobless, including those too discouraged to keep looking, has hovered around 30%. Participation in the labour force is a good 10-15 percentage points below other comparable developing countries. In 2004 the government pledged to cut unemployment in half by 2014. But the best it can now promise is to do so more or less by 2020 … //

… Under proposed labour laws, recently approved by the cabinet, employers would no longer be able to take on short-term staff save in exceptional circumstances. Temping agencies would be abolished and companies would be required to register all vacancies with government labour centres. Continue Reading…

What would you say if I told you that all of the work that Westerners do in the developing world for less than 6 months amounts to nothing more than poverty tourism?

Is there a small part of you that might agree?

This is a question that we face at ThinkImpact directly, and we are eager to learn more from the social enterprise community about the lines between poverty tourism, slum tourism, volunteer service, experiential learning, and ultimately, for ThinkImpact,
social entrepreneurship training in villages at the base of the pyramid. Continue Reading…

… And then there’s the remarkable state-level progressive labor rebellion that has erupted in the United States, where right wing governors’ and state legislators’ attack on public worker benefit levels and negotiating rights amounts to the largest assault on labor’s political and collective bargaining power in recent United States history. Much to the surprise of Wisconsin Governor Stott Walker, the clumsy, messianic, business-backed Tea Party governor who launched the assault, workers and citizens have responded with an historic uprising in defense of labor rights. The Wisconsin State Capitol in Madison has become the site of an incredible three-week (so far) protest that has sparked support demonstrations across the country and received statements of solidarity from Egypt. Continue Reading…

Published on Pambazuka News, by David Ntseng with Mark Butler, March 3, 2011.

David Ntseng reflects on his visit to villages in KwaZulu Natal at the invitation of a Rural Network militant, to see how the communities lived and ‘connect their struggles to their daily experiences’. Unless there is ‘commitment to organising and mobilising in numbers’, efforts to dismantle the forces that condemn people to poverty ‘will be in vain’, notes Ntseng.

Over a number of years, Thulani Ndlazi has been Church Land Programme’s primary link with the emergence, growth and struggles of the Rural Network. During 2010, while Thulani took some sabbatical leave, colleague, David Ntseng, took on temporary responsibility for sustaining those links. Up until then, David’s contact with militants of the Rural Network in Northern Zululand had mostly been enabled through participating in solidarity actions – especially at the eShowe Magistrates Court where a case of murder of two scholars is being tried against two security guards: Continue Reading…

Côte d’Ivoire has been in a political impasse since the declaration of contested results of a second round of presidential elections held in November 2010. Since both candidates claimed victory and have been sworn in, the country has two presidents and two governments. In order to understand the impact of this situation on women and women’s rights organisations, AWID (Association for Women’s Rights in Development) spoke with two women’s rights defenders, Mata Coulibaly, president of SOS EXCLUSION and Honorine Sadia Vehi Toure, president of Génération femmes du troisième millénaire (GFM3), as well as with an Ivorian politician who prefers to remain anonymous and to whom we have given the pseudonym of Sophie … // Continue Reading…

There is no evidence that this government’s anti-poverty strategy is having any effect in reducing relative poverty in the UK. A recent report, Poverty and wealth across Britain 1968 to 2005, confirms what many social workers already know – that while the very poor may have been lifted out of extreme poverty there has been a continuing rise in poverty defined as ‘breadline poverty’. The report draws attention to the problem of social segregation and shows that poverty is ‘clustering’ as the wealthy flee to the outskirts of cities. It also shows that the gap between rich and poor is currently the highest it has been in 40 years. Continue Reading…

Sad to say, the environment cannot defend itself. It is up to us to protect it—or what’s left of it. But all the superrich want is to keep transforming living nature into commodities and commodities into dead capital. Impending ecological disasters are of no great moment to the corporate plunderers. Of living nature they have no measure. Continue Reading…

There seems to be a prevailing orthodoxy in social work debates which silences unfashionable opinions. Ideas about poverty and class, which are part of social work’s heritage, almost never get a hearing. If social work is to keep its radical tradition it must resist these Orwellian trends.

The thrust of my argument is that language is being used to re-shape public perceptions of poverty. The reason for this is that the middle class, the dominant group in society, wishes to deny the truth about poverty and to close down clear-thinking and intelligent debate on the subject. Furthermore, the social work profession is abandoning its traditional concern with poverty and inequality because middle class leaders of the profession want to ‘forget’ these problems. Continue Reading…

Soumouni, Mali — The half-dozen strangers who descended on this remote West African village brought its hand-to-mouth farmers alarming news: their humble fields, tilled from one generation to the next, were now controlled by Libya’s leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, and the farmers would all have to leave.

“They told us this would be the last rainy season for us to cultivate our fields; after that, they will level all the houses and take the land,” said Mama Keita, 73, the leader of this village veiled behind dense, thorny scrubland. “We were told that Qaddafi owns this land.” Continue Reading…